Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#51

Post by jasonkostempski »

gigatexal wrote: post #25

Twitter is in the news all the time with POTUS, or something else. Talk show hosts like Fallon use it as a bit on his show. And yet it just can't grow. It's time to start charging the twitter faithful a WhatsApp style fee of say something small a year or monthly. I'd hate for twitter to go under.

Sounds like a sure way to kill it off completely. Maybe if they just stop trying to add crap to something that was pretty much perfect the day it came out, they could just coast on whatever cash they're already bringing in.

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#52

Post by criddell »

segmondy wrote: post #23
thebiglebrewski wrote: post #3

What are people's opinions on the most optimistic case for Twitter (the business)?

Cut their staff by 75%, run a lean operation, stay profitable and be just an "average boring company". Don't do anything and die a slow spectacular death. Add more features and have their app to start competing with Snap, Facebook, WhatsApp, Medium... except I don't think they can pull this up. I think the first choice is the best, get rid of Jack while at it, sure no Bozo CEO, but Jack needs to pick either Twitter o…

> Cut their staff by 75%, run a lean operation,

That would still leave them with close to 1000 employees. I wouldn't call that lean. They can cut deeper than that.

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#53

Post by infamouscow »

tdkl wrote: post #37
gigatexal wrote: post #25

Twitter is in the news all the time with POTUS, or something else. Talk show hosts like Fallon use it as a bit on his show. And yet it just can't grow. It's time to start charging the twitter faithful a WhatsApp style fee of say something small a year or monthly. I'd hate for twitter to go under.

Grow where ? Do people realize there are actual limits on growth because humans aren't infinite ?

In the past this has been a sustainable theory. Growth in the physical world through railroads or petroleum were much slower and far less directly tied to a single person. So from the perspective of investors it seems like a reasonable argument. What we're seeing for the first time with Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat is the maximum size that physics allows.

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#54

Post by criddell »

thebiglebrewski wrote: post #3

What are people's opinions on the most optimistic case for Twitter (the business)?

What I'd like to see: Twitter accept that they are largely done growing. Rather than chase after new users, they focus on their current users and focus on the core product. Pissed off investors dump the stocks, the share price plummets, and the founders take Twitter private.

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#55

Post by [deleted] »

koolba wrote: post #5

> It also lost both its chief operating officer and chief technology officer, increasing the load on Dorsey, whose time is divided because of his other job -- as CEO of Square Inc. I find it interesting that the CEO of Twitter has two jobs. It's really in line with our future of a "sharing economy" where one job isn't enough to survive. It'd be funnier if it was Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO) but this is pretty good too.…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#56

Post by gk1 »

petercooper wrote: post #38

I'm not surprised. Their ad product is just not that good. I spend $ on FB and it works. On Twitter.. gee, you can pay $2 per follower you end up getting. Organic is so easy on Twitter that you don't need the ad product.

I've spent thousands on Twitter ads (for my clients) in the past but am spending less and less these days.

Their new card design (ie, design of the ads) apparently is a magnet for unintentional clicks. Around 90-95% of clicks for my last campaign were accidental.* The crazy thing is that their support team knows about the problem yet they still charge you for those clicks as though they are legitimate, AND they still let people create ads in that format. I've since taken my (clients') advertising dollars elsewhere. No wonder their ad revenue has gone down.

*I can only assume they were accidental because Twitter showed, say, 100 clicks, and Google Analytics showed just 3 visits. Yet Twitter support insisted the clicks were legitimate. That means people clicked the ad (unintentionally) and, upon realizing it's loading a new page, left the page before it finished loading.

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#57

Post by nolok »

thebiglebrewski wrote: post #11
andy_ppp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's difficult to say; my guess is endless layoffs and a slow gradual slide into irrelevancy like Yahoo! - no-one is really interested who is young at arguing with strangers online. Do we know of any companies in tech (apart from Apple) who got big, stopped growing and managed to turn it around? Will it be an amazing purchase that saves them (like Apple did)?

Yeah! But...how hard is it to cut it down to real bare-bones staff and still somehow manage to have $120M in revenue and way less costs? Or is it mostly server and processing costs from how real-time their platform is?

While it is probably the sanest objective in terms of "let's be real and honest about it", 120M or even ten time that is not going to cut it with their current situation as a tech unicorn getting to the end of their ride and trying to stop their valuation from melting.

For reference, They were still valued in the 30+ billions range mid-2015, and now barely hold above 10B.

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#58

Post by ianleeclark »

paulcole wrote: post #47
swingbridge wrote: post #41

Twitter probably gets more free PR (with the news about famous people tweeting) than just about any tech company out there. It's sort of found its niche as a nano-blogging platform for people others like to listen to. It's never going to get to the true social network like Facebook and others have achieved, but that's fine. The issue is just that's it's a very bloated company. I still question why Twitter isn't just…

>I still question why Twitter isn't just like 100 people in a basement somewhere. Interesting idea. Has this ever been discussed on HN before?

ad infinitum

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#59

Post by Thrillington »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #51
gigatexal wrote: post #25

Twitter is in the news all the time with POTUS, or something else. Talk show hosts like Fallon use it as a bit on his show. And yet it just can't grow. It's time to start charging the twitter faithful a WhatsApp style fee of say something small a year or monthly. I'd hate for twitter to go under.

Sounds like a sure way to kill it off completely. Maybe if they just stop trying to add crap to something that was pretty much perfect the day it came out, they could just coast on whatever cash they're already bringing in.

It had no ads or other potential for revenue the day it came out.

Re: Twitter Shares Drop as Pace of Growth Slows

#60

Post by thebiglebrewski »

criddell wrote: post #54
thebiglebrewski wrote: post #3

What are people's opinions on the most optimistic case for Twitter (the business)?

What I'd like to see: Twitter accept that they are largely done growing. Rather than chase after new users, they focus on their current users and focus on the core product. Pissed off investors dump the stocks, the share price plummets, and the founders take Twitter private.

Sounds good to me, the user!
Post reply on HN